NTP 2018: Government Might Ask Companies to Set Up Data Servers in India by 2022

The government has confirmed to announce the National Telecom Policy 2018 tomorrow, under which it’s going to bring vision on Indian telecom sector until 2022. In the NTP 2018, the government may come up with provisions on data independence and might ask all the companies hosting data of India to set up the servers in the country by 2022. This news was reported by Press Trust of India. “The NTP is being framed with vision to give access of all services to people at click of a button. For most of the things like education, government services and even health people should not need to visit physically. There will be a lot of data generated for all this. Hence, NTP is likely to propose setting up of all servers hosting data of Indian citizens and entities to be kept in local servers by 2022,” sources aware of the matter said to PTI.

• Make Telecom Talk My Trusted Source
• 
• 

This essentially means that the government will limit the telcos and other companies to keep the data of Indian citizens such as messages, emails etc. within the boundaries of the country unless it’s addressed to the people stating overseas. Currently, most of the companies including social media, email firms are using data servers located abroad, even for the emails or messages sent within the national boundary.

“Draft (NTP) will have provision around data sovereignty and stringent framework for data protection in the telecom networks. All ministries are working on their digital program as directed by the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi). Telecom has to be a key enabler of all these processes, and data security is extremely important to support transformation to digital infrastructure,” the report further added.